Dreamer's Magic Designs

This is something I have seen lots of people on the siggy board ask how to do, and so I am going to show **my** way of doing it. I dont use a mask, but it can also be done with a mask, i just find this overall easier for me.

Now, starting out, Ive already done the vibrant photo, fixed my colors, and have a good image to start with. So you should do the same before starting this tutorial. Make sure you are happy with it before you start to try and acheive this effect as far as colors go. Sharpen you edges, fix your color balance. And then go from there.

Step 1: Duplicate your photo layer, so that you now have 2 layers of the photo. Both blending modes should be set at " normal "

Step 2 : select the top layer. go into your filters menu, and under blur, select surface blur. You are going to want to play with your sliders until the skin looks almost porcelein and very very smooth and creamy. You are probably losing detail on the hair or eyes or other areas. do not worry about that right now, its why we have layers. just pay attention to the area you want to look really smooth, and slide the bars till it looks how you want. Hit ok.

Step 3: Now, still having that top layer selected, get out your eraser tool, and select a soft round brush. erase away the blured layer over the hair, eyes, any area that you want to bring the crispness back to.

Step 4: Now select the BACKGROUND , bottom photo layer, and duplicate it. Now you will have 3 layers of the photo. the top, blured layer that is partially erased, and then 2 of the origional photo.

Step 5: On the middle layer, using your magnetic lasso tool, select around one of the eyes ( this is where you could use a mask if you prefer working with masks ) now, keep that selected and filter > sharpen more, and then filter, Unsharp Mask. Play with your slider till it looks sparkly! Hit ok, but dont deselect that area.

Step 6: keep that eye selected, and go into adjustments > hue & saturation. Slide the top bar, the hue bar until the eyes are the color you want. for example, bri has pretty blue eyes that werent showing in this picture, so i slide it all the way to the right, until the eye became blue. You could also bump the saturation up a bit if you wanted.

Step 7: Repeat steps 5 and 6 on the other eye.

Now, if your eye effect is to bold, reduce the opacity of that middle layer until it looks right for the effect you want.

Now look over your image, on mine i decided i wanted it a bit softer, so repeated the surface blur on the top layer, with a threshold of only 2, play with yours if you need to. it wont be the same for every photo.

then flatten it. and here is my final picture. I would love to see yours, and hope that this tutorial helps get the photo effects that you want.

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